Category: Collaboration

What do the “Millennials” think about the future? | WEF Global Shapers Survey

Each year the World Economic Forum surveys young people, targeting those aged 18 to 34, for their views on five areas:

  • Economy and global outlook
  • Governance and civic engagement
  • Technology and innovation
  • Values and society
  • Business and the workplace

This year over 31,000 people took part globally.

50% of the world’s population is under the age of 30. While they have a powerful voice, they are not being listened to by decision-makers. Here is what they have to say.

As with previous years, this year’s survey shows some interesting results:

I’m primarily interested in the technology and innovation and the business and the workplace answers, but before I dive into them I need to point out:

For the third year in a row, “climate change/destruction of nature” is ranked as the most serious global issue with 48.8% of votes.

I’ll leave that hanging there, it doesn’t need any more comment.

Moving on to technology and innovation:

An overwhelming number of young people think technology is “creating jobs” (78.6%) as opposed to “destroying jobs” (21.4%). This is consistent with the results of the 2016 survey for the same question.

I hope they are right, time will tell. My personal leaning is also towards that view, but I am concerned that those jobs will primarily benefit the rich and educated leaving behind whole sections of society.

The survey also shows that young people have a sophisticated approach to information sharing and also the quality of information that is being shared:

Although for young people the internet and free media are essential to feeling empowered, they value it to the extent that the content and information they are exposed to is factual and trustworthy. In times when fake news lends itself to being shared on social media, it is reassuring that youths feel responsible for changing such practices and ensuring factual information is circulated.

It’s not surprising that an age group that has grown up with the internet have built up a healthy caution about the content that is being pushed at them.

The rapid changes in technical capability are having a massive impact on business and the workplace:

I personally don’t like the term millennial, even though I used it in the title of this post, it carries too much baggage and stereotyping to be of much use (I’m not sure that I would class someone who is 34 as a young person either, as this report does). One of the stereotypes that the millennial term has propagated is tackled in the survey:

Young people feel that they are perceived as lazy, impatient and entitled and, as they are known as the “job-hopping generation”, are perceived as caring little for work. Our data, however, has so far drawn quite a different picture of who this young generation is.

The report goes on to explain that young people regard work as a key part of life, that they care about corporate responsibility and that they want to work on something that has a purpose amongst other insights. All attributes that are not too different to previous generations.

When I see surveys like this one I have a lot of hope for the future.

The survey report is below:

Why do we complain about free things? I can think of some reasons.

Facebook is free.

Twitter is free.

Instagram is free.

Google is free.

WhatsApp is free.

Skype is free (for most of us)

Yet, when they don’t do what we expect them to do we complain bitterly, it’s as if they were part of our monthly utility bill.

Why do we do that?

I think that there are several reasons.

  1. We are invested in them – Even though we haven’t paid cash for these services we have invested in them. We’ve invested our time and energy into the content that we’ve placed on them. We’ve invested time in understanding how to use them. We’ve changed our life to fit them in. That investment gives us a right to complain when things go wrong.
  2. They are charging us – There is a charge for each of these services and the charge is attention. Most of these services are subsidised by advertising which takes our attention. However good you think you are at ignoring these adverts you are kidding yourself if you think that they aren’t taking some of your time away. If you could put a value on that time what would it be? We secretly know we are being charged and that gives us a right to complain when things go wrong.
  3. They are selling you – As well as charging your attention these services are also selling your information to someone. We make a contract with them that enables them to do this on the understanding that the service stays free. We know they are selling us and that gives us the right to complain when things go wrong.
  4. Entitlement – The cost of something rarely defines our feeling of entitlement to it. When someone promises to do something for you, even if it’s for free, we get upset when they don’t deliver. These free applications have promised to do something for us and now they aren’t. If you are entitled to something you have a right to complain when things go wrong.

I’m pretty sure that there are more reasons, but I think those are the main ones.

I apologise if this free service didn’t live up to your expectations, please feel free to complain. Please be assured that reason 2 does not apply to this blog; I don’t think reason 3 applies to this blog, I don’t sell your information to anyone, but I can’t be sure that others in the supply chain don’t; I’d be amazed if reasons 1 and 4 applied to your use of this blog :-).

Do you have a wandering mind? It’s probably making you unhappy.

The other day we revisited the subject of multi-tasking and I talked about a few ways I try to remain focused. Focus isn’t just important for productivity, it’s also a core competency for happiness.

Back in 2010 Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert published a scientific paper titled: A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.

We developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.

Let me say that a different way: spending your life thinking about things that aren’t happening is making you unhappy. You would be happier if you focused on the here and now.

So much of the multi-tasking that we do is an attempt to switch between multiple things that aren’t happening, it’s a type of active mind-wandering. How many times do we check our social media to see if something is happening only to be reminded that nothing is happening. How many times have you refreshed your social media site only to refresh it again, and then again without even thinking. The research tells us that this is making us unhappy.

Below is Matt Killingworth talking through his work at TEDx:

Matt also talked through his findings on the TED Radio Hour in 2014.

Facebook and Google dominate the 2016 Top 10 US Smartphone Apps List

According to data from nielsen the most popular smartphone application in the US in 2016 was Facebook, but that’s not the only Facebook asset in the top 10 – Messenger is #2 and Instagram is #8.

The Facebook number is impressive at over 146 million average unique users per month. The US population now stands at around 324 million which means that over 45% of the US population uses Facebook on a smartphone every month.

The other dominant force on the list is Google who take places #3 to #7 with YouTube at the top of the list at over 113 million average unique users.

The two remaining spots on the list go to Apple and Amazon.

The Amazon app is also the fastest growing application in percentage terms with Google Search and Google Play in the slower growth lane:

Viral Rumours, Human Behaviour and Twitter NOT shutting down

Have you heard the rumour that Twitter is shutting down because of abuse problems? It’s not.

Likewise, Facebook will NOT be charging from the Summer of 2016 (if Summer ever arrives around here)

As humans we love rumours and we love to propagate them, particularly alarming ones. There are situations where our love for the alarming causes false rumours spread faster than the facts.

Social media allows us to spread these rumours at a pace unimaginable in the past. But there’s more to it than that, the nature of social media makes these rumours highly believable and amplifies the rate of propagation.

People spread rumours for a reason, but there doesn’t seem to be too much consensus on what these reasons are. The list that made the most sense to me was this one:

  • People Spread Rumours When There’s Uncertainty
  • People Spread Rumours When They Feel Anxiety
  • People Spread Rumours When the Information is Important
  • People Spread Rumours When They Believe the Information
  • People Spread Rumours When it Helps Their Self-Image
  • People Spread Rumours When it Helps Their Social Status

From Social Psych Online.

Automated bad process is still bad process

Google has a new technology in Inbox called Smart Reply:

Smart Reply suggests up to three responses based on the emails you get. For those emails that only need a quick response, it can take care of the thinking and save precious time spent typing.

You might think that this is a brilliant idea, when I read it my heart sank and my head screamed “NO!”

This post is my attempt to unravel that emotional response.

In the early days of the BlackBerry my boss at that time took to responding to every email he received from his mobile keyboard. If you sent him an email you would receive a response in a few seconds, or not at all. The problem was that none of the responses were of any value. They would be quick responses, they would be short responses, but they rarely dealt with the questions that I needed a response to in enough rigour that I didn’t have to send another email for further clarity. I soon learnt not to send him emails with more than one question in because he would only ever respond to the first one. Smart Reply would have been his best friend, and my worst nightmare.

Don’t get me wrong it’s not the technology of Smart Reply that I have a problem with but the human behaviour that it facilitates. It automates what I regard as poor process, for me email isn’t the medium you use when you want a short reply.

In the GIF above that shows Smart Reply working the examples replies show my issue. These are the replies to the question: “Do you have any documentation on the new software? If not maybe you could put something together, it would be really useful for onboarding.” This is a sensible, valid, email question.

Let’s look at the available responses:

  • “I don’t sorry” – This would be an extremely frustrating answer because it only answers half of the question. The complete answer should be something like “I don’t sorry, but it is on my list of activities to do and should be available by next blue moon.” Getting half an answer is neither use, nor ornament, it’s just frustrating.
  • “I will have to look for it” – This is, again, an incomplete answer.  When are you going to look for it? Why can’t you look for it now?
  • “I’ll send it to you” – This is the chosen answer, but in many ways it is the worst answer of all. Why didn’t you just send it to me? Or, more appropriately for a Google focussed answer why didn’t you just share it with me? Now that you’ve replied and got it out of your inbox my suspicion is that you’re going to forget to send it to me. Why didn’t you just wait to respond when you could send it to me?

Rather than sending me a short incomplete answer I’d rather wait for a slower but complete answer. I’ve sent you the question on email so I’m not expecting an immediate response anyway. Rather than automating poor process I’d rather encourage good process.

I’ve not had chance to look at how Smart Reply works in production. Reading the description and looking at the mock-ups it shows that the Smart Reply is only the start of a message for you to build from, which is great, my concern is that the start might not lead to a complete response, just a response.

The rapid-fire-mobile-emailer can shoot out hundreds of responses an hour and leave anarchy behind them. My concern is that Smart Reply helps them fire quicker a just increases the anarchy.

I’ve used these words from Peter Drucker on several occasions:

“There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.”

I think they sum up my emotional response.

On a more humorous note: Seven Sinofsky suggests that Smart Reply is kind of what Microsoft were trying to do with Clippy all those years ago:

Now let me see:

I'm being a bit less social

I suspect that I’m like most people when I say that my on-line social activity has gone through a number of phases of evolution.

If you were to look through my Twitter feed or Facebook newsfeed from a few years ago you will see that they are much more active than today. One measure of this activity would be frequency of posts, which has dropped significantly. Another measure would be the number of direct posts where I write something directly in Twitter or Facebook, which has all but stopped. If you could measure openness you’d also notice that I’m less revealing about my emotions, my location, my family, my faith even. I’ve made a conscious choice to be less publicly social.

There are a number of reasons for this, some of them are about simplicity and basic privacy. One of the major reasons, though, has been the realisation that we are all public figures now and I’m not sure I’m ready for that.

At first I thought that being publicly social would in turn give the opportunity to be famous, I’m not talking about global fame just recognisable-in-my-own-little-world famous.

Then I started to see some people become social-media famous and it wasn’t a good thing to witness.

At one end I saw situations where people were trying to make a serious point only to be misunderstood and ridiculed. This isn’t a new phenomena, fame has always been like that, Francis Bacon put it like this:

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

At the other end of the spectrum I saw people’s lives torn apart by being exposed to the shouting-mob. Jon Ronson researched the experience of many people including  Justine Sacco who he highlighted in this TED talk (below). The research resulted in him writing a book with the title: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

There are many cases of ‘ordinary’ people being thrust into the public glare and shamed:

I’m not condoning any of these actions, personally I wouldn’t do any of them. What is scary is to see that these are ‘ordinary’ people thrust into the public glare with a few clicks on a screen and the amplification of the social platforms.

I’ve never liked mobs and I certainly don’t want to be part of one, or even associated with one. So, for now, I’ve decided to be a bit less public.

I did wonder about going far more private on my settings, but I’ve decided against that for now.

"Performance ratings data within companies is all bogus"

Most of my exercise is accompanied by podcasts. Whether I’m out for a walk or in the gym I’m likely to have someone speaking in my ears.

This morning something went “YES!!!” in my head when I heard these words:

“Performance ratings data inside companies is all bogus. It doesn’t actually measure what it says it’s measuring. Which, of course, is hugely problematic because we end up promoting people, and paying people, and training people, and deploying people based on those rating data and they’re invalid.  “

These are the words of Marcus Buckingham speaking on The Future of Work Podcast in which Jacob Morgan.

Sometimes you hear something and you know intuitively that there’s something significant about it, and that’s what happened to me this morning.

I’ve been subject to a number of rating systems in my time, some of them with forced bell curves others not; some of them have had a few points of assessment others with many areas of assessment. These assessments have always been done on an annual basis with the occasional mid-term review. None of them have made a significant difference to what I’ve done day-to-day and they’ve all felt like they were being done to tick-a-box for the corporation. I’ve always been diligent in ticking that box because the numbers in the assessment have made a difference to the money in my pocket but little else.

There have been a number of high profile organisations switching away from these systems:

Marcus’ own article also cited Deloitte – Reinventing Performance Management.

The Performance Review systems that I’ve experienced tend to link together development and reward. Often they are the only conversation about development and reward that an employee has with their manager. Everyone knows that this shouldn’t be the case, but it’s what happens.  I can’t remember a time when a Performance Review has resulted in a change of my Development Priorities. The times that I’ve developed the most have always been whilst working for an effective team leader, hence some other words from the podcast resonated:

“I strongly suggest the future of work should be built around the practices of what the best team leaders do anyway, and they do not do a one every six-week conversation…what they do do is check in with each person each week about the work, it starts with the work.” Marcus Buckingham

We may not be in a position to change the performance rating system, but we can all make a different to people’s development in the places where we lead.

I like Marcus’ principle of 5 minutes to tell me about 5 things for the next 5 days.

"The Rise of Dynamic Teams" – Alan Lepofsky and Bryan Goode

Continuing my review of some of the sessions from Microsoft Ignite 2015 the title The Rise of Dynamic Teams caught my attention.

When I saw that the presenters were Alan Lepofsky and Bryan Goode it was definitely going to be one to watch.

This session has an overarching question raised by Alan:

Could you be more effective at work?

Well of course I can.

All I had to do is to think back to the last time I was frustrated at work and there clearly presented was an opportunity to be more effective.

Promised Productivity

Alan also highlight that we’ve been promised improved productivity for decades now, but in his opinion not really been delivered it.

My personal opinion is that we have improved our productivity, but mostly by doing the same things quicker, rather than working in different way. A good example of this is email where we send far more messages far quicker, but definitely less effectively.

Framing the problem

Many of us can recognise the issue of information overload. We use many different systems and are fed information all the time.

Alan frames a different problem which I also recognise – input overload. This is the problem we experience when we think about creating something and can’t decided what it is we are creating or where we are putting it – Which tool should I use? Where did I post it?

The point is that we now have a multitude of choices of tools so we don’t necessarily need more tools, but we do need to tools to be simpler and to collaborate together.

Best of Breed v Integrated Suites

Alan reflects on two distinct approaches to collaborative tooling – one which focusses on the best of breed capabilities and one which takes a suite of collaborative capabilities.

These are illustrated below:

Best of Breed Collaboration Tools

Suites Collaboration Tools

The key to the suites approach is the content of the centre combined with the ability to integrate third-party capability and have data portability.

I’m not sure I would put everything in the centre that Alan does but I wholly agree with the principal. One of the significant challenges with a suite approach is that by choosing a suite you risk creating a lock-in situation. This lock-in isn’t necessarily one of data lock-in, what’s more likely is capability lock-in.

Intelligent Collaboration

Alan explains what he means by Intelligent Collaboration:

“This is poised to be the coolest shift we’ve had in collaboration tools we’ve had in 20 years”

“The ability for us to start doing really cool things based on intelligence is really going to dramatically change the way we work”

In the Microsoft approach this intelligence will initially be focussed on the individual, but will then extend to teams and organisations.

The systems that we have today have a very limited view of context and what view they do have they tend not to use with any intelligence. Take the simple example of email build-up during a holiday period. You can set up an out-of-office response, but wouldn’t it be great if something more intelligent happened.

If we take that simple example and add onto it all of the sensors that will soon be reporting on our well-being and location. You can then imagine getting a response from your bosses intelligent assistant asking you to attend a meeting on her behalf because her flight back from holiday has been placed into quarantine due to an outbreak of a virus for which she is show the initial symptoms.

Adding to the context will enable many more intelligent interaction.

Imagine a digital assistant system that made decisions based on – location, time, time-zone, emotional state, physical state and many more.

The Rise of the Dynamic Team

This is the point in the session where Bryan Goode adds the Microsoft perspective. He does this by focussing on:

Modern Collaboration

The perspective defined by Bryan is that teams will continue to utilise many different tools and will be increasingly mobile.

Microsoft are also investing heavily in meeting experiences, something that is in desperate need of improvement for all of us.

Intelligent Fabric

In order to enable modern collaboration Bryan talks through the Microsoft view of the need for an Intelligent Fabric.

Two examples of this fabric being built are Office 365 Groups and Office Graph.

Office 365 Groups provide a unified capability across the Office 365 tools for the creation of teams. A group created in one of the Office 365 tools will be visible in all of the other tools – Sites, OneDrive, Yammer, Exchange. Doing this makes a group a fabric entity rather than being locked into any particular tool.

Office Graph brings together all of the signalling information from the Office 365 tools and any other integrated tools. It’s role is to bring together the meta-data from different interactions and activities.

Personalised Insight

An Intelligent Fabric is one thing, but creating value from it is the important part.

In the presentation Bryan demonstrates Office Delve which utilises the signalling from Office Graph to create personal insights.

The personal insights currently focus on the individual, but they are being extended to provide insights for groups and organisations.

“Teamwork is becoming a first-class entity across our products”

Bryan Goode

I’m not going to explain the demonstrations other than to say that they are worth watching, as is the rest of the presentation.

Conclusions

Productivity and collaboration are going to be a defining features of future organisations as can be seen from the posts that I wrote on the Productive Workplace.

Microsoft is in a position to generate a lot of innovation and disruption by building on top of the Office 365 ecosystem. Groups, Graph and Delve are just the start of that. Having released themselves from the shackles of delivery by Enterprise IT organisation they can potential move at a pace that places them ahead of the pack.

More…

The presentation and video for this session is here.

The video is also embedded below:

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK1106/player

Going Tribal? Internet Tribes

Steve Denning recently wrote a post in Forbes highlighting what he regarded as 5 reasons why Google+ was died.

In Steve Denning fashion the article was well crafted and made some interesting points. It’s not the purpose of this post to assess the merits of that article; what has intrigued me was the responses to the article.

At one level Google+ is just another social media platform, but that’s not how many of the people who use it perceive it, or at least that’s not how they respond when challenged.

These are some of the responses:

I just checked your G+ profile – 2 POSTS on G+ and that’s it? Sorry but you have no right to write blatant hit pieces on G+ when you don’t even USE the product. Just because you don’t engage with people on G+ does not make it dead. You can check the author’s G+ profile here as he was to embarrassed to link it to his profile: https://plus.google.com/112179839227533740446/posts

and

Steve, it may have been better if you did some research and reached out to the community.

This just has you looking really stupid, writing an article just for linkbait.
We have seen it so often from contributors to MSM articles.

or

The only problem with Google+ is that people like yourself don’t know how to use it. I love Google+ Like Bob Dylan sings; Some feel the rain, others just get wet.

and

LMAO – I’m just another ghost calling from the dead G+! As a ghost I find it has the most informative and well reasoned subject matter and commentary! Really fb is for baby pictures and Twitter is for abuse.

With many more to choose from; there are also a whole load of well-reasoned comments.

You’ll notice here that there are a some characteristics to these comments:

  • They claim an allegiance to a club or tribe.
  • They claim a value and exclusivity to being part of the tribe.
  • They define Steve as being outside of the tribe and hence of a lower value. This is especially true as the commentators try to flag him as a member of different tribes such as Facebook or Apple.
  • They are adamant and definitive about the veracity of the tribe.

These behaviours aren’t unique to people who use Google+, it’s a common human response. Anyone who has seen a gang at work will recognise these traits:

  • You are either in the gang or you aren’t.
  • Your gang is always the best gang and you are privileged to be a member of it.
  • If you aren’t in the gang then you are in some way undervalued, particularly if you are a member of a different gang.
  • Membership of the gang is a lifelong choice.

Steve also wrote a second article – Has Google+ Really Died? – highlighting, among other thing, the responses that he’d received:

Enge’s study also sheds an interesting light on the reaction to my article last week, “Five Reasons Why Google+ Died?” There was a torrent of comments on Forbes itself and heavy traffic on Twitter and Google+ itself.

A good part of the commentary was supportive, particularly on Twitter. The article was headlined on the Forbes leadership page and picked up by SmartBrief on Leadership.

The negative comments fell into three main categories. Some were heartfelt user pleas, along the lines of: “I and some of my friends just love Google+. How could it have died!”

Others questioned in a more thoughtful way the analytic basis for my citation of the declaration by Scott Galloway, the NYU marketing professor, that Google+ was “already dead.”

A third category of negative comments was vituperative in tone: the comments questioned my intelligence, my analytic capability, my bona fides, my work ethic, my motivations, my financial integrity and even my right to say anything about Google+ at all. Not liking the message, these commentators attacked the messenger.

The tone of these latter comments often seemed to resemble that of people defending a struggling religious cult, rather than the users of a mere software tool. Looming over the discussion, of course, is Google’s track record of abruptly canceling products that haven’t met market expectations. Is Google about to pull the plug on Google+ too? The fans’ angst is understandable.

It’s interesting that he highlights how the comments on Twitter were supportive, perhaps that has a lot to do with the comments coming  from members of a different tribe?

The Internet is littered with competing tribes and I wonder whether it’s really doing us more harm than good. I’ve done a bit of research into conspiracy theories lately and it seems that a lot of that has to do with tribal thinking – you are part of a special in-crowd if you believe something different to the mainstream. Internet hoaxes fall into the same class – how many of you have seen fake pictures of surfers at the Sydney Opera House recently? People spread them around because they want to enforce their place in the tribe that they subscribe to.

We all have a deep-seated need to belong, but I wonder whether we are allowing that to get in the way a bit too often?

We have a huge choice of tribes to join but how do we know which ones are good and constructive ones?

History has shown us that we are stronger when tribes collaborate, are there any really good examples of that on the Internet?

Sorry no answers in this post, just questions.

Millennial are just like everyone else! No surprises there then.

Millennials (also known as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y) are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates when the generation starts and ends. Researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.

Wikipedia

Millennials are everywhere, both literally and figuratively:

They get characterised in all sorts of ways; the Pew Research Institute allows you to take a survey to assess How Millennial Are You? This survey includes the following questions:

  • Do you have a tattoo?
  • Do you have a piercing in a place other than an earlobe?

(I’m not very Millennial, but that’s not surprising as I was born in the 60’s which are nowhere near the 80’s and I’m lacking any bodily adornment)

Time Magazine characterised them as the Me Me Me Generation.

Recently IBM undertook some research to see whether all of the characterisations were true. You can perhaps imagine some of the findings by the title Myths, exaggerations and uncomfortable truths – The real story behind Millenials in the workplace:

In a multigenerational, global study of employees from organizations large and small we compared the preferences and behavioral patterns of Millennials with those of Gen X and Baby Boomers. We discovered that Millennials want many of the same things their older colleagues do. While there are some distinctions among the generations, Millennials’ attitudes are not poles apart from other employees’.

Our research debunks five common myths about Millennials and exposes three “uncomfortable truths” that apply to employees of all ages. Learn how a multigenerational workforce can thrive in today’s volatile work environment.

(Emphasis mine)

What were the myths:

  • Myth 1: Millennials’ career goals and expectations are different from those of older generations.
  • Myth 2: Millennials want constant acclaim and think everyone on the team should get a trophy.
  • Myth 3: Millennials are digital addicts who want to do – and share – everything online, without regard for personal or professional boundaries.
  • Myth 4: Millennials, unlike their older colleagues, can’t make a decision without first inviting everyone to weigh in.
  • Myth 5: Millennials are more likely to jump ship if a job doesn’t fulfill their passions.

Remember, they are called myths because they aren’t true. In the main the research discovered that the Millennial generation is just like the Baby Boomer and Gen X generations in all of these traits. There are some situations where it’s the other generations that are different – “Gen X employees use their personal social media accounts for work purposes more frequently that other employees” – but there are no polar differences between the generations.

So why is so much being written about the differences that the Millenials will bring, some of it is also research based, but I’m sure that there is a good deal of confirmation bias to it also (but perhaps I like the IBM research because it confirms my bias).

INSTA, TWIT and BOOK say goodbye to PLUS

Many gangs have people who hang around trying to join them; wanting to be part of the inner circle, INSTA, TWIT and BOOK‘s gang was no exception. PLUS has tried to become a full member of the gang for some time now but they’ve never made the grade.

Recently PLUS has reluctantly decided to stop trying and has decided to make its own way in the world.

Fortunately for PLUS they retained a shape-shifting ability in their DNA. Enacting this ability they have started the morph into STREAM and PHOTO whilst giving birth to a new child HANG. I suspect HANG will get adopted by the DRIVE gang leaving STREAM and PHOTO to go their own way.

INSTA, TWIT and BOOK noticed that PLUS had left, but they didn’t have a party. PLUS was one of many trying cement a place in the gang; PLUS may have been one of the noisiest but it’s not always noise that makes the difference.

The thing about being at the top of the tree, as INSTA TWIT and BOOK are, is the constant fear that someone is going to chop your tree down or build a bigger one right next to you.